Slack wasn't competing with IRC. By the time Slack launched, IRC usage within companies was a very tiny slice of the market, mainly by very technical people. Slack was competing with Microsoft Lync, Google Talk, HipChat, Campfire, and the various other "IM for businesses" software products that were available in 2013.
Yes, Slack borrowed some of the better features from IRC, which helped drive its popularity, but very, very few companies that are currently paying for Slack would have considered IRC to be a reasonable alternative.
But there were already other comparable solutions that existed and had adoption at the time -- eg. HipChat. I get why something like Slack or HipChat beat IRC, but what did Slack do differently than the existing offerings that enabled it to beat them all out so easily?
I wasn't referring to things like IRC. When Slack was initially released, it was no different from Campfire and a whole string of other web-based chat systems that came and went going all the way back to the dawn of AJAX in the late 90s. Slack's improved a lot since then, with app integrations and other features, but fundamentally it wasn't any different than its predecessors. It's easy to think that Slack did something groundbreaking, or figured out the magic solution to the problem that sank its predecessors, but just like Discord, the reason Slack won is because it came along at a time when companies can raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to float them for years while offering a free product. Then they can upsell later, and/or commoditize their users' personal information. Those business models weren't as easy to come by in the past, so a lot of products failed. None of this is to bash Slack; it's an adequate product for what it does.
Another big thing that the current crop of winners has going for it is that cloud hosting allows applications to launch literally for free and scale quite a bit without paying much of anything in infrastructure costs. That also wasn't an option 10-20 years ago.
Slack is undoubtedly better than IRC, but so is Flowdock or HipChat and the other players that existed in this space before.
Slack's innovation was getting a huge funding round, blowing it on advertising to mainstream non-tech markets and trying to build a competitive moat with 3rd party integrations that other developers are incentivized to make on their own due to Slack's large user base.
Very few prior apps did what Slack is doing [1] And there are not that many actual competitors if you start counting them.
[1] It's still strange to me that many people compare Slack to IRC and XMPP and complain that they were doing all the same things, why have people abandoned them. Even though they (and especially the clients) were doing (or capable of doing) just a small fraction of what Slack is doing.
People do use Slack because it looks better and is easier to use.... the features you're talking about are possible with IRC, it just requires work that the average consumer isn't willing to do. The other half of the equation is that IRC is better in ways that consumers don't care about, yourself included.
Slack is successful because IRC web clients are so cumbersome and annoying. Most of the things Slack provides easily could've been provided in a web-based IRC client, but where's the upside for Slack in that?
By adopting an incompatible web model, they lock people and their messages in, and can charge per user in the room. As a good IRC client, the most they could get away with is a subscription charge per client, which has the downside of creating a barrier to entry that limits adoption (requires everyone who wants to use it to pay, v. a central employer or organization that can compel people onto a chat platform).
Users like web-based because it means that they just click a button and the thing they want magically appears with no install process. Companies like web-based because it allows them to box all the secret sauce behind a server that can't be introspected. There's no risk of someone cracking their program and distributing it for free, and they get to keep complete control over the crown jewels, which are now and always have been the data that the program purports to manage.
At our company we use Slack [1] all the time for chatting and keeping in touch. It's basically just an IRC front end. (Slack is co-founded by Stewart Butterfield of Flickr)
For me the big advantage is that it "just works" (web interface + mobile app) for everyone in the company whereas there is overhead to getting IRC setup. We had tried IRC previously and it didn't take. It also doesn't hurt that Slack looks sexy.
I think that IRC has really stuck around because it somehow really captures asynchronous group discussion, but also simultaneously keeps the barrier to participation really low. It makes total sense to me that the IRC community is still so strong.
Great user experience, compared to what IRC was. Especially for non-tech people, so it could span the entire company.
Clean & simple Web UI, Drag'n drop file sharing, rich multi-line text, beautiful colors/branding, session & history handling, search functionality etc. are just some of the thing that come to my mind. IRC had no consistent experience, you just needed to know what the best client is and setup bunch of other things.
Functionally Slack might not have offered much over IRC at least for techies, but UX-wise it was a leap forward. It made chats approachable.
To be fair, (as a Slack user) I'm not sure off-hand what Slack has that couldn't have been done on top of IRC. Almost everything could have been done with an IRC Server + Backend Services + Fancy Client model.
In my opinion IRC is superior to Slack, so I really don't understand this argument. (You're assuming Slack is an improvement on IRC, when in fact it's a completely different platform.)
I don't see anything conductive to actual work that slack has but IRC lacks. the software industries and choices of tools such as chat clients are fashion-driven and most people will be hard pressed to provide a reason why they prefer slack or discord or whatever the newest shiny toy is other than "it's popular". They're popular, in turn, because their owners have marketing budgets, and decentralized, superior alternatives don't, because they are not commercial products. Just accept that any choice of tools or technologies is typically at least 95% irrational and dictated by marketing, not by rational reasons or calculations of risks and benefits. It used to be that companies would never risk third parties getting hold of confidential internal communications, nobody cares anymore though.
Maybe it's a tech company thing but we were using irc for years before slack came about. We eventually swapped to hipchat as it was easier for less technical people to join, and later slack when that shutdown.
Almost every open source project I've worked on coordinated on irc back before slack/discord took over so it's hard to says text based communication tools are anything new. What I will give tools like slack is massively improving ease of use for less technical users, which has meant it's now used much more widely outside technical spheres.
Which only means the use case for the average user changed and the protocol failed to keep up. And you speak as if the few things I mentioned were the only things that IRC can't do that literally all of its competitors can, rather than a small sample of missing features.
Let's see, in addition to what's above, off the top of my head:
* Video chat / screen sharing
* Audio chat
* First class support for connectors to external services (i.e. not a fake client connected to each room)
* First class support for permissions, registration, etc (rather than a fake god-client service package)
* REST API
Compared to IRC, Slack is more beautiful, more usable, more flexible.
It's a great microcosm of the free-vs-proprietary debate that's been raging so long. Slack is winning the fight because it wins in ways that are visible to everyday users, while not being philosophically better.
I absolutely don't understand why chat is such a lucrative market. All the products are nearly identical. All the most useful features of Slack were available in IRC.
IRC was just a chat app, yet even though it didn't age nicely, was still seeing massive usage for professional communication up until lately. Is it only because of legacy? Hardly, new blood was pouring in constantly, the only hit it took was skype.
Slack is simply disrupting this area by offering product which is up to date and doesn't need bouncer running (+ hundreds of other useful nice to have features).
I don't know why didn't just evolve irc. Feature wise slack doesn't really bring much new. It just has a good interface. If someone made an irc client as easy to use as slack then we'd have our answer.
Yes, Slack borrowed some of the better features from IRC, which helped drive its popularity, but very, very few companies that are currently paying for Slack would have considered IRC to be a reasonable alternative.
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